Author Archive for: Frans

About Frans

Jeroen is Internationally known as Frans, which is fitting because it is also his last name. He is one of the three Founders of the Vesuvius Group, LLC, and functions as a Virtual World Technology Specialist and Developer.

Jeroen is a creative spirit and futurist always looking forward to how innovative technology can be used and enhanced. This drives him to try his hand in many technologies, and his early adoption has resulted in a wide skill set in programing, 3D & web design, machinamatography, animation, etc. In short you can say he is a generalist or a Jack-of-all-trades.

His friends like to call him an International Metaverse Superstar, because he seems to be everywhere, and known widely in the Metaverse.http://www.franscharming.com

Entries by Frans

As part of the community grassroots fundraising relief efforts for Hurricane Katrina victims in 2005, Frans Charming was involved as the overall project manager and along with Rhiannon Chatnoir and other volunteer builders, recreated part of the French Quarter of New Orleans in Second Life. You can find more pictures in this set. Experience the […]

The Vesuvius Group is proud to participate – with the Center for Public Diplomacy and Metaplace (Raph Koster, the founder of Metaplace, as usual, writes a very smart blogpost about the future of virtual worlds and how we can take our place alongside other social media in getting the news out) – in presenting the […]

We were a vendor this past weekend at the Virtual World Best Practices in Education 09, and had a great time meeting people and going to presentations. Lots of insightful stuff, which we hope have been blogged about around the web. 😛 For now we have these textures we made for our vendor spot.

Built for Global Kids, NYC as part of their MacArthur Foundation funded initiative to create a International Justice Center within Second Life that would focus on issues of justice and human rights law throughout the world. Still in progress (in second phase of dev) and also involved event management during opening events. View more images […]

Machinima created for the 48 hour film festival that took place within Second Life. The screenplay, storyboards, build stage sets, props, filming and editing done by The Vesuvius Group. Other entries can be viewed here.

Created a reproduction of part of Google’s Mountain View, CA campus for the 2007 Google Zeitgeist event. It included 3D representations of Google technologies, a networking lounge area, a speakers hall with information on all speakers and the ability to message them and creation of an interactive HUD that contained this info, a map and […]

Created the official starting point sim for the 2007 Relay for Life. The them for 2007 was “The Quest (For the Cure)” and we created a Tolkien inspired themed sim that included a hobbit village, the elven city of Rivendell, a scaled down model of Minas Tirath, the Argonath sentinel statues, the Black Riders racing […]

Google dropped a bomb on the virtual world market today by releasing a new virtual world called Lively. I’m not writing a deep review yet, my first impression is that it feels like IMVU. It is better then IMVU though, you can at least move your avatar around a room, but the best part is […]

There will be a Virtual Web Symposium Wed. Feb. 27th, 15:00 – 22:00(GMT +1) at De Balie (Leidseplein) in Amsterdam. The event will include Scientists, Educators, Web Specialists, 3D Designers and Technicians. There will be demonstrations, lectures and discussions (both live and virtual) about Education and the Future of the Virtual Web For a list […]

Metaplace is the in development virtual worlds platform, that will let you make your own virtual world for any platform. They are still in Alpha but slowly ramping up to a Beta. 2 weeks ago they had a Public developer chat, which they held in world via a web client. Next Friday 5pm PST they […]